Vanesa Rodríguez, research vocation and passion for forensic engineering

Vanesa Rodríguez (Calatayud, 1993) is Project Manager and development engineer at INFINITIA. Since she was young she had a clear idea of her career, as she admired those professionals capable of solving problems of almost any kind in a creative way.

In 2015, while still studying at the University of Zaragoza, she began an internship at BSH Electrodomésticos and, in 2018, she graduated with a special mention in the BSH-UZ Award for Innovation in Business in the category of students thanks to her Final Degree Project.

Driven by her vocation for research and oriented to solving problems in industrial environments, she continued her studies for a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering specializing in Materials, studying part of it at the RWTH Aachen in Germany. During this stage, he did an internship at the Institute of Carbochemistry, belonging to the CSIC, and developed his Master’s thesis, obtaining an honors degree and having published two scientific articles in the journals Energy Storage Materials and ACS Applied Nano Materials.

For Rodriguez, success lies in providing reliability and confidence in each project in which he participates. In this sense, a remarkable milestone in her time at INFINITIA -a team to which she has belonged for more than three years- happened in 2019 during a development project with a customer, which incorporated her as one more in the work team, changing the perspective of her work by perceiving how, as a group, they were able to offer the best response to their customers, meeting the real needs of the development, quality, production and purchasing technicians in solving their problems.

In this way, the engineer’s personal challenge has been to complement her technical profile with interpersonal skills, which have resulted in a renewed professional facet in the commercial area and direct communication with customers.

Rodriguez, with his experience and training, brings value within the areas of Forensic Engineering and Materials Innovation and more specifically, in everything related to metals and failure mode analysis. Thus, in his day-to-day work, he carries out project management tasks and coordinates them with other purely technical tasks, ranging from proposal development, assessment and execution to the implementation of online technologies and experimental analysis in the laboratory or factory.

From his point of view, Materials Engineering is of vital importance in the industry, facing the progress of technologies and products with increasingly demanding requirements, which also require optimization in the selection and use of resources in production due to the scarcity of raw materials and the open challenges regarding sustainability and circular economy.